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21 février 2020

How do you teach a car that a snowman won’t walk across the road?

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. How do you teach a car that a snowman won’t walk across the road?
Melanie Mitchell, Aeon, 2019/12/26
I understand the concern, but I think it relies on a myth that won't - in the long run - bear scrutiny. The argument here is essentially that human drivers depend on a wealth of knowledge known as 'common sense' - "the mostly tacit ‘core knowledge’ that humans share – knowledge we are born with or learn by living in the world." The myth here is that there is 'core knowledge', that it is common, and that it is required by an autonomous car. The sort of person who uses 'common sense' to plough through a pile of leaves or into a flock of pigeons is the sort of driver who has accidents because "nobody could have predicted" the hidden tree trunk or the damage a pigeon can cause. More...

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21 février 2020

The Five Stage Model

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. The Five Stage Model
Gilly Salmon, 2019/12/26
Gilly Salmon is asking for feedback on her five stage model of online learning. I'm not a fan of 'stages' - the idea that we would been socialization and information exchange before knowledge construction and development seems overly formal; all of these happen all of the time at once. And these days, we don't need to 'access' so much any more; we just turn on the phone. Also, we rarely socially 'construct' knowledge; it's a much more organic process. Some interesting comments on the LinkedIn post. More...

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21 février 2020

Educational visions

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Educational visions
Rebecca Ferguson, Ann Jones, Eileen Scanlon, Ubiquity Press, 2019/12/26
I spent the better part of Boxing Day afternoon reading and mostly enjoying this book (186 page PDF). It is based on the work over the last 40 years of the Computers and Learning Research Group (CALRG) at the U.K.'s Open University. The point of departure is CALRG's "Beyond Prototypes" which is used to explain "why educational technology initiatives worldwide succeed and why they often fail." This then informs four major areas of inquiry: teaching and learning at scale, accessible inclusive learning, evidence-based learning, and STEM learning. Each is given a historical perspective, then in a separate chapter a look forward. In a commentary on the book Martin Weller describes it as a "good example" of an alternative to the "wilful historical amnesia in much of ed tech." Maybe so. But let's not forget that this is a book specifically about the Open University, and that while nobody doubts the OU's importance to the field, nobody would say that it alone defines its history, despite the often subtle ways the book says just that. Still. More...

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21 février 2020

Undergraduate Philosophy Journal of Australasia

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Undergraduate Philosophy Journal of Australasia
2019/12/26
This link is to the first issue of the Undergraduate Philosophy Journal of Australasia. I like not only that it is open access, but also that it is by and for undergraduate students. Now I have my criticisms of journals and that whole practice, but I also think it's really important for students to engage in the actual practices of a profession (for better or worse) as they learn about it. More...

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21 février 2020

English isn't generic for language, despite what NLP papers might lead you to believe

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. English isn't generic for language, despite what NLP papers might lead you to believe
Emily M. Bender, Symposium on Data Science & Statistics, 2019/12/26
This is from last March, but I found it today, and the title alone is worth passing along this set of slides. "Natural language isn’t just English, and NLP work should stop pretending that it is. If you’re a consumer of NLP tech (e.g. for text as data research), demand better." See also: Wenyan, "an esoteric programming language that closely follows the grammar and tone of classical Chinese literature. More...

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21 février 2020

Teaching online is different: Critical perspectives from the literature

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Teaching online is different: Critical perspectives from the literature
Caitriona Ní Shé, et.al., Dublin City University, 2019/12/25
This is a good paper (43 page PDF) but because of its methodology - a systematic literature review - it reflects a fairly narrow perspective and feels ten years out of date. According to its publicity it "emphasises the importance of interpersonal skills and having a compassionate approach for effective teaching online" but I found this a bit incongruent with its discussion of the roles of an online teacher (and, again, this is a discussion long since past - see my own work in this area from a decade ago). More...

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21 février 2020

@bluesky

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. @bluesky
Tim Bray, Ongoing, 2019/12/25
These are reflections from Tim Bray (who knows a thing or two about protocols) on Twitter's @Bluesky proposal to create a decentralized social network. Will it work? he asks. Probably not. There are too many things that can't be fixed via the protocol alone - things like "the messy political mechanisms behind our imperfect but essential legal and regulatory frameworks." But maybe it could work, he says, with carefully designed APIs and the sort of AI-based indirection proposed by Stephen Wolfram. And there needs to be some mechanism to define 'verifiable or not' in the network's algorithms, he says. More...

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21 février 2020

The Stories We Were Told about Education Technology (2019)

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. The Stories We Were Told about Education Technology (2019)
Audrey Watters, Hack Education, 2019/12/25
Audrey Watters has amassed an impressive list of ed tech failures of one sort or another for the year and comments, "So much innovation and 'edsurgency.' And if we’re not careful, if we do not hold these entrepreneurs and barkers and politicians accountable, if we do not remember their failures and falsehoods, then we will find that all this will just repeat itself on into the next decade". More...

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21 février 2020

Web 2.0 Technologies Supporting Problem-Based Learning: A Systematic Literature Review

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Web 2.0 Technologies Supporting Problem-Based Learning: A Systematic Literature Review
Erhan Ünal, Journal of Problem Based Learning in Higher Education, 2019/12/24
The more I see systematic literature reviews, the less reliable I think they are. In the current case (26 page PDF), the author surveys the literature between the years 2004-2018 to find articles investigating the use of web 2.0 technology in problem-based learning (PBL) and finds only 18 articles to include in the review, the vast majority of which use the wiki in PBL. It's hard to believe that the academic record on this topic is so sparse, even if the selection is limited to "only high quality peer-reviewed published articles". More...

Posté par pcassuto à 08:39 - Commentaires […] - Permalien [#]

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21 février 2020

We Can’t Handle What the Internet Has Done to Us

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. We Can’t Handle What the Internet Has Done to Us
Jules Evans, OneZero, 2019/12/24
The funny thing, for me, is that I'm actually comfortable with all this chaos. The whole internet thing doesn't bother me. Why not? Here's how Jules Evans characterizes the problem: "Social media has also totally transformed our politics, in a decade. It’s ripped apart our sense of trust in media and politicians.... The trick mirror turns everything into a performance, so political debate becomes wrestling.... We have reached a stage of collective consciousness, through globalization and the internet, and we can’t quite handle it."
So why am I OK with all this? Maybe it's because I grew up in a small town, maybe it's because I was writing from an early age, maybe it's because I never trusted media and politicians, having seen from the inside how they fabricate reality, maybe it's because I read a lot of science fiction and to me all this is normal. More...

Posté par pcassuto à 08:38 - Commentaires […] - Permalien [#]

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